Cold brewed the rest of my sample and at the start it tastes like nothing and then a bit of white tea and spice kicks in. Subtle but nice. I am happy I got to try this so thank you Cavocorax for the share :)

I saw this tea on the table and decided to have it again. It’s weird because when I am drinking it I am pretty meh about it but at the same time it is easy to get through. Today I am having it cold brewed and for some reason it reminds me of a Christmas blend. Somehow I am getting a little bit of orange, spice (which I think is actually the gunpowder smoke) and a tiny dash of vanilla. Still doesn’t scream Dean and Castiel to me but its a simple enough tea to sip away at while studying for Litigation. Thanks again Cavo!

Preparation

Thank you Cavocorax for the share. I believe I have had this before and I like it more than I thought I would but I don’t know if it effectively captures Dean and Castiel. It’s a little smokey so that covers the hunter vibe but there isn’t a ton more going on in the cup. Mostly is smooth and sweet but doesn’t really have a strong flavor of any of the three types of tea. I’m not really sure what to make of it.

This is a flavored black tea blend, which is appropriately named. I taste pumpkin and cinnamon initially, and then clove and sugarcane, and then oddly, banana. I can smell the banana in the liquor too. The tea leaves the same kind of creamy coating in your mouth that pumpkin pie does. It’s very rich in umami.

Weirdly enjoyable blend.

Flavors: banana, Cinnamon, Cloves, Pumpkin, Spices, Sugarcane

Preparation

The guy who created these blends did a crappy job matching the name of the potion to the personalities of the tea. The Draught of Peace should be a bedtime blend, not a caffeinated blend; the Butterbeer one should have a rooibos base; Felix Felicis should be caffeinated (to make the drinker feel like (s)he is ready to take on the world); and there shouldn’t be one named Veritaserum because Veritaserum is supposed to be clear and flavorless. It’s almost like he just made a bunch of awesome blends and then assigned them potion and beverage names from the Wizarding World at random.

I mean, they’re all delicious. Especially this one, which is a black tea with raspberry, dark chocolate, and hazelnut flavoring. I gotta say, this is one very nice tea. I love how the cocoa is bitter, not sweet. The raspberry is naturally sweet enough to balance it in a very organic way. The hazelnut is a nice touch, too— it’s almost like drinking deconstructed Nutella. Stripped of all refined sugar and calorie- free. Perfect for First-Half-of-January Resolutions. ;)

It was apparently inspired by the large ice cream that Hagrid buys for Harry in Diagon Alley in The Sorcerer’s Stone. Which has absolutely zilch to do with Veritaserum, because that potion doesn’t even get mentioned until The Goblet of Fire. Maybe he should have named the blends after the books instead?

I got a Fandom sampler pack of all the Harry Potter potion teas for Christmas. (What can I say? My family knows me well.) This is the first one I tried.

I steeped it with skim milk in my Kati mug. I will confess that I underleafed and overmilked, so further study is needed.

For what it’s worth, I taste a lot of cream, vanilla, and caramel. The aroma before sipping is butterscotch. I taste the familiar astringent Adagio black tea base, but the flavorings are well balanced and play nicely with it.

Not a whole lot of surprises in this first cup. Can’t wait to try the others in the pack!!

//NOTTEA
In my 3rd week of my semester at UCF, and so far I really am enjoying it. All of my teachers this year are great, and i’m learning a lot from my classes. I’m taking Front-End code, Back-end code, User Experience design(UX) and an Information Entrepreneur class. Now to just prioritize it all….

//TEARELATED
Yesterday I got the news in my email that my TF2 fandom blend is going to be featured all day tomorrow on the site. I can’t believe a collection I made a few years ago for fun is going to get this kind of recognition. I’M SO EXCITED.

//TEA
This came out quite nicely. I basically wanted this tea to taste like gunpowder, or at least what a explosive work table would smell like; but in a good way. Also to be a great boost of explosive energie from the mate’.

I combined the first two steepings into a mug after doing a quick rise and found it to be a really rich, smokey, and bold cup. Although it didn’t have a thick mouth feel like I thought it might due to the Pu’er. It had a surprisingly light and clean mouth-feel. The smokey flavor was the most dominant. There was lots of intense pine spice and even a little bit of menthol flavor as I kept drinking. By the time I got to the 3rd steep onward the smokey flavor had subsided and the smooth, leather pu’er was shining through, with the other teas playing in the background. This tea deffeintly delivered on the energizing boost with the mate I put in it. Going to keep some of this around for winter when I need a kick int eh pants for those hour long drives to 8:30 classes at UCF.

Overall I’m really glad how this one came out. Nice bold and smokey cup with lots of depth and an intense energy boost.

Flavors: Earth, Menthol, Pine, Roasted, Smoke, Spices, Tobacco, Wood

Preparation

Another one that I got from my discounted sampler while up at school. Out of the pack I got, this one was one of my favorites, having a truly alien flavor. One of my friends even called it out of this world, though Kasumi is one of the more grounded characters in the game-well, with the exception of her exquisite tastes. This tea was designed around her very well, though how can you accurately characterize someone based off of tea notes? Tis an art that I am partially curious of.

To describe this tea properly, I am going to talk about her character a little bit. Kasumi is a master, intergalactic thief and cat burglar, stealing pieces only of the “priceless” kind. She herself does have a Japanese heritage, and like a hooded ninja, she is incredibly skilled in stealth, hacking, and deception. Though adept, she is by no means hardened; more playful, and possibly insightful, really.

For whatever reason, this black and rooibos blend actually suits her well, and better than a green tea. Yes, she’s Japanese, but that cultural angle comes more in with dominant jasmine smell and taste. After the jasmine, the taste transforms into something creamier, and maltier, with a candy like sweetness provided by the cream black tea and the Earl Grey moonlight. The rooibos provides the remaining potent sweetness from it’s own mildly citrus like nature, and the amber color of this tea. Like her, there is a sweetness and decadence to the profile, but a lingering subtlety in how the flavors come together.

Now, this is not a tea for most. It is VERY sweet. It’s more for an amateur who would like the highly flavored nature of this tea. And definitely for a Mass Effect fan that likes this character. The extreme dependence on the extracts for flavor is the only other off putting angle of this tea, relying less on the natural, pure taste and aroma of the tea itself. That can be said for most Adagio tea, though: too much dependence on flavoring extracts. As you can probably infer from reading this, this is blasphemy for a tea purist; yet a new, foreign dessert to a newbie.

A nice caramel apple scent greets you upon first whiff. Very enticing. Upon brewing, the tea tasted a little bitter to me. Perhaps I went too long with 5 minutes. That’s what happens when you have a 3 year old distracting you from your tea drinking ;) I added some cream and sugar and it smoothed it out and a caramel apple flavor stayed. Very nice blend.

Flavors: Apple, Caramel, Spices

Preparation

I’ve been doing crazy sipdowns of everything that various people have sent me, & although many of them are teas I’ve reviewed before, this one isn’t! Thanks to Cavo for the opportunity to sample this. It’s pretty potent with a mix of black tea, orange, chocolate, chai…who knows what else. Kind of feels like one of those ‘kitchen sink’ type blends.
But I’m kind of enjoying it, although it isn’t something I’d want to drink more than once, & definitely not something that I’d want to have around. And now it’s gone!

Drinking this again as I package up some swaps. This one is going out to Janelle along with the rest of the Harry Potter sampler teas, who will hopefully enjoy the whimsy (:

This time, I can taste a fairly strong raisin note, which is confusing me. I haven’t picked up on it before with this tea, and it can’t be cross contamination either. Hmm. Oh well, it’s pretty tasty and the 50/50 black and Rooibos base means no caffeine overload!

I feel like I need to post a tasting note to commemorate the occasion. This will have to do. It’s been another deadline day for me today, which means staying in pyjamas all day, unshowered while staring at my laptop and wishing I was dead. Not a good day for a birthday/anniversary, overall. I chose to review this tea because it was one of only two cups I had today while I was working, and I don’t even remember what the first one was.

This is a nice tea to sip on. I chose it today since I needed calming down, and it actually kind of helped. The mixture of black and rooibos in the base makes it robust enough to keep me focused while relaxing me at the same time. I quite like the combined base! The predominant flavour here is definitely caramel. As somebody who grew up having treacle tart as dessert with school lunches, I wouldn’t say it’s a perfect match, but it definitely reminds me of the filling. There’s a burnt caramel, thick treacle-y note which transports me right back, and it’s actually very tasty. There’s even a suet-y taste, although I’m not sure if that’s maybe coming from the rooibos or my imagination. I’m missing the flaky pastry taste which would make this a spot on representation of a treacle tart in tea form, but as it is it’s a good tea and I don’t suppose you’d know the difference if you’d never had treacle tart before. I’ve just started considering making tea syrup, as I’ve read a few interesting things about them, and this might be a good place to start.

so confession time. i DID enjoy adagio’s vanilla oolong when i was in the chicago store. Just not enough to buy any. This is another form cavocorax and it’s a much better blend. I think non black fan blends do it for me more than black fan blends. I like this sort of smokey, vanilla thing it’s got going on…but of course it makes me want to try it with something like mandala’s wilver buds + vanilla and then maybe a little cacao? haha i need to write ideas down… on the whole…not a bad cup but nothing i need to repeat! :) thanks cavo!

Final Count: 141 after a partial add to my cupboard…this will go up tomorrow!

Confession: I bought this tea PURELY bc of the name (and the pairing). And snowbud sounded angelic and delicate, which is about as tenuous as the relationship implied. (Why do angels have gender anyway. HARRUMPH)

This blend smells just like a chocolate cake—it’s hard to describe, but there’s even that moist, freshly-baked quality to it. In terms of flavor, it’s very authentically chocolatey as well, with a touch of liqueur-like, cherry sweetness. Most chocolate-flavored teas I’ve encountered outside of Butiki are downright unpleasant, so this was a nice surprise. (“It wasn’t nasty” might not sound like high praise, but for teas of this category it is!)

The tea base, however, is not that great. There is not much to be said about it, and it has an acidic quality that makes the blend less enjoyable. So, in terms of authentic flavoring it’s a win, but could do with a better backdrop.

Too much hibiscus in this one for my taste. As the tea cools, I pick up on other notes: I can taste the blood orange and the tangerine and lemon notes. I didn’t taste a lot of the white tea. This ends up tasting more like a citrus punch than a tea.

Not my favorite. It’s not bad, I finished my cup after it cooled and enjoyed it as a cool beverage and it was alright.

I’ve seen others put in custom blends- so I hope I’m doing this correctly. I mixed Adagio’s Cream (black tea) with Tea Gschwendner’s Caramel. These were samples from The Cookie Lady and Marzipan- thanks ladies! I thought Caramel Cream sounded good. It’s already been a long hard day and it’s just the afternoon. So, I’m sitting down to rest some with my cup of tea! My sister was put into the hospital yesterday with chest pains and they are doing testing. We homeschool and have had a full day. I’ve done 4 loads of laundry and cleaned the kitchen. I have overdone it and I’m now hurting. A cup of tea to the rescue! (And essential oils for pain!). Enjoying the caramel and cream flavors. I am getting both flavors but the caramel is the strongest. I would have liked a creamy cup- had one from the tea spot that was really creamy. Kinda sits on the tongue with a bit of aftertaste that has a bitter bite to it. Perhaps I oversteeped it? Directions on one was 3minutes and other was 2 minutes. I should have gone for the less time but I did it in the middle at 2 1/2 minutes. I would try this blend again.

Thank you. She was released from the hospital tonight. They dud a heart Cath. Echo and lung test. I don’t thing they really found anything. Perhaps it was stress. She’s to follow up with a dr. Thanks again for the concern.

Yikes! Sounds like you’re having a time of it. Hope all’s well with your sister. Remarkable how tea and sympathy (aka, comfort and community) never go out of style. Here’s hoping a warm cup can warm your heart.